Anonymous IRC Logs: A Moment in Time

December 16th, 2010 by Barrett Lyon

The DDoS attacks against VISA and Mastercard (among others) were mostly symbolic and were executed by a group called The Anonymous. The group itself is comprised of anyone that wants to join; such loose membership requirements attracts a huge assortment of people. These attacks made by The Anonymous were the first Cyber Protests I have seen executed largely by non-techies. The average person was unaware of this, only hearing about the results of the attacks via pundits on the news. Typically, during a protest, photojournalists are able to capture the moment, showing the huge crowd in front of the White House or angry mobs of people with signs in Greek protesting against government austerity. In this case, (unless you know how to use IRC) it was quiet and invisible — a few web sites simply stopped working.

However, it was not quiet or invisible. There were some 10,000 angry people online with digital voices working towards the same goal. I logged (as many people did) their IRC servers and their public channels. I took those logs and put them into a browser format that anyone can read. What you see in these logs is a captured moment in time; it’s a captured moment of that protest. It is really the only visual representation of the passion of these thousands of Cyber Protestors.

The log represents about 30 hours of irc.anonops.net and are by no means complete. It’s a view into the protests of the future that don’t have lines drawn across tangible borders.